What I saw at the mid-century launch pad
By Joel Shurkin
Forty-three years ago this summer I covered one of the most important stories in human history: The first human landings on another world. Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong. The moon.
It was a different journalism world then, and a different America. The media were concentrated, rich, powerful. America was self-assured, rich, daring.
Children, you missed a wonderful time.
In the Sixties and Seventies, newspapers and the television networks dominated the media. The papers that employed us were big, fat, and not reluctant to spend money. The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I worked for 12 years, produced a Sunday paper so large they had to start printing on Thursday, and on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, you could get a hernia lifting the paper from the porch. Before working there, I was a national correspondent for Reuters in New York, then for a British news service, the oldest, largest, and richest in the world.
I got to be Reuters’ chief space correspondent when the reporter who had the beat said it bored him. The next mission was Apollo 11, the first men on the moon. That bored him? Naturally, I volunteered. Actually, I hurt myself climbing on the desk, waving my arms madly, jumping up and down, and screaming “take me!” They did. NASA was launching manned missions then every three months. This is how it worked:
You would go to Cape Canaveral for the launch.
Someone figured out that it would be cheaper just to have me rent an apartment at the Cape than to have to get a hotel room every three months, so that’s what I did. I had a one-bedroom apartment on the beach for two years on the expense account.
We watched launches from grandstands about a mile away, as close as you could safely get. The experience was better than sex: It never disappointed you.
The launch of the Saturn V rocket would start with a flame that grew so bright it bordered on unwatchable. Then came the noise, a crackling roar as the rocket slowly rose, a cacophony that you felt as much as you heard, rattling through the ground and through your skeleton. The only logical reaction was to stare. I filed my story, in my case, by Teletype.
Then, we tore in our rented cars to an airport for a chartered DC-8 lovingly called the “Drunk Flight” to Houston, where we got into rental cars and raced to the Manned Space Center, praying nothing happened in the two hours while we were in the air and out of communication.
This was ridiculous. But Texas congressmen, including Lyndon Johnson, told NASA that if it wanted large amounts of money to play with, they better build something large and expensive in Texas. Hence, mission control at the Manned Spacecraft Center — later the Johnson Space Center — more than a thousand miles from where the rockets went up.
Reuters’ general manager in New York then was a large Englishman, Alan Paterson. Besides being a gentleman, his stated attitude was: “If you can’t live better on the road than you can at home, there is no point being on the road.” Hence, a legendary expense account.
Paterson’s greatest fear was that if he didn’t use his expense budget (rumored at $1 million in 1960s dollars) by the end of June, London would reduce it, so around April, we started flying first class.
One day I mentioned that in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, the hero is shot into space from a cannon in Florida. After the launch, he opens a bottle of Nuit St. Georges, to toast the mission.
“Fabulous,” said Paterson. “Every launch go get half a case of Nuit St. Georges for the press blokes.” I did. Several hundred dollars. We served the lush burgundy in Styrofoam cups because alcohol was prohibited in government installations, but the public information people managed to come wandering by just at the right time to join the toast. (The Apollo 15 astronauts later named a crater after the wine and buried a bottle in the moon where it is presumably aging amiably.)
One of my colleagues was a wine connoisseur. Thus, I learned French wines on a Reuters’ expense account.
We usually had four or five people in Houston, everyone with a rented car and hotel room.
The reporters following the space program included about 100 regulars, some of whom were then, or became America’s best-known science writers, several of us later won or shared Pulitzers. For several years, we worked together, ate together, drank together with all the dynamics of a family. There was at least one marriage (long and happy) and several affairs (short and complicated). Many of us have remained friends ever since.
We had a huge room for a press center. There were no cell phones or computers, of course, and I did the mathematical calculations needed (mostly nautical miles to statute miles) on a slide rule, occasionally misplacing a decimal. If you went out to dinner, you phoned your desk to tell them where they could reach you.
Despite the perks, the job could be stressful. During Apollo 13, the flight that almost ended in catastrophe, the Associated Press, for reasons unknown, decided reality needed some adjustment. I saw one colleague in tears, trying to explain on the phone to his desk in Miami that his calm and deliberate story was more accurate than what they were seeing on the AP wire. It was a contemporary analog to the current meme that if it is on the Internet it must be true. In those days, if it came over the Teletype it must be true even if it contradicted your own reporter.
London, watching AP get most of the play in the world’s newspapers, started tinkering with our ledes. My staff and I rebelled and threatened to quit on the spot unless they left our stories alone. Paterson, a thoroughly ethical journalist, agreed with us and made a phone call. The sub-editor on the desk in London was reassigned.
And we could create history as well as report it. When Armstrong stepped down on the lunar surface he said either “That is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” or “That’s one small step for a man….” The air-to-ground transmission was fuzzy.
Seems minor but it would be one of the most famous quotes in history, and we could not be sure what the words were. We also could not be inconsistent among ourselves. So, about a half dozen of us gathered in the newsroom and decided he did not have the “a” before “man” and that’s the way it went out to all the outlets.
It turns out that when they cleaned up the transmission, we were right, he had accidentally dropped the “a.” But by then, it didn’t matter; we wrote the history.
Joel Shurkin is freelance writer-historian specializing in medicine, science and history, based in Baltimore, Md.
